Characteristic of monocular microscope vision and its application on assembly of micro-pipe and micro-sphere

The characteristics of the microscope vision system are investigated based on its working principle. The microscope vision belongs to planar vision with small view field and very small view depth. Its sensitive freedoms of degree are three, including two translation motions and one rotation motion. Based on these facts, a new measuring model adopting Jacobean matrix is presented for the microscope vision system, and an active calibration method is developed. As the typical application of the microscope vision, an assembly system to assemble a micro-pipe and a micro-sphere is designed. A two stages assembly strategy is proposed. In the first stage, the operation platform, the camera´s adjusting platform and the manipulator are manually controlled to make the micro-sphere and the micro-pipe in the view field. In the second stage, the camera´s adjusting platform and the manipulator are automatically adjusted to obtain the clear image of the hole and the tip of the micro-pipe. Then the manipulator is controlled to align the tip to the hole and insert the tip into the hole according to their relative positions. The micro-pipe with 10 μm diameter was successfully inserted into the hole of 12 μm diameter on the micro-sphere, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed methods.